Editing Duskblade (section)

===Feat Tricks===
If you're going straight duskblade, or building a gish with sorcerer as the casting side, take Arcane Strike at 9th level (or whenever it is you get access to 3rd-level spells).  This will let you sack slots for a bonus to attacks as well as extra untyped d4 damage, based on the level of spell slot you sacked, for every attack you make that round.  This includes full attacks, attacks of opportunity, anything you get from an ally's spell or abilities, etc.  Oh, and it activates as a free action, though it has to be on your turn.

This works slightly better for duskblade due to the massive number of spells they can throw into this feat, but it still works amazingly good for sorcerer-based gishes.  You can get bigger bonuses with higher-level spell slots that way, if your spells just can't do much to a given enemy.  So instead of moping about how your ''fireball'' doesn't do shit to a red dragon, you just grin and start pumping spell slots into full attacks every round.  For the best effect, use Arcane Strike with arcane channeling to hit something with ''vampiric touch'': the temporary hit points can save you when the dragon tries to full attack you in return, and your AC isn't quite high enough to stop all of them.  Or, use ''bestow curse'' or ''enervate'' to truly fuck over the enemy by giving them enough penalties to make them ineffective.

In the above example, as a 10th-level duskblade/sorcerer/spellsword/ab-champ, you have BAB +8 and 4th-level spells.  If you take a move and a standard action to use arcane channeling with vampiric touch, you could make a single attack at +12, which does base weapon damage + 4d4 untyped, plus another 4d6 damage that gives temp hp equal to the damage done.  You still have a swift action you could use for spells that let you turn invisible, fly, or boost movement for that round.

After that, you have a bit of a choice to make: you can get more fighter-style feats to enhance melee tricks, or more spellcasting feats for that side of things.  You can't be as super-tricky in melee as a properly built fighter, but charging or tripping are certainly within reach; you can get Shock Trooper online pretty easy, or build up all the tripping feats you need.  It may even be possible to make some builds that don't work with fighter work better with a duskblade; a Shield Charge build benefits because you can use arcane channeling with shield bashing, and some feats allow a shield bash to do even more bullshit (such as free tripping and other stuff).

If you go for more spellcasting, you're looking at two things: metamagic, and reserve feats.  Metamagic is pretty self-explanatory; you want stuff like Extend (which will, in fact, stack with the ab-champ class feature that doubles abjurations), Silent, and/or Still.  If you are a sorcerer gish, consider Versatile Spellcaster, so you can do more with your spell slots.  Really, though, reserve feats can be the real deal here.  The best of these is Minor Shapeshift, which requires you to have a good 4th-level polymorph subschool spell (like, uh... ''polymorph'') available.  You should already have ''polymorph'' because of how Goddamn broken it is for a gish, but Minor Shapeshift means that so long as it's still available for casting, you can give yourself a nice list of bonuses ranging from temp hp, a slight bonus on melee damage, claw attacks (which do respectable damage and are never a bad thing when your weapon gets fucked up), and bonus speed (to any movement mode, no less).  Arguably, the second best choice is Summon Elemental.  Yes, the elemental is pretty weak compared to anything a spell could summon... except you can summon these little elementals for free with the feat, and used them in a number of clever ways.  Pop one up in front of you to break an enemy charge; use them to gain flanking bonuses; open doors and chests and stuff without worrying about traps; scout out certain areas (including the other side of a wall, if you summon up an earth elemental).  Other useful reserve feats are Blade of Force, Borne Aloft, Dimensional Jaunt, Hurricane Breath, and Mystic Backlash.

There is one last line of feats that can be of enormous use to a duskblade: draconic heritage feats.  You need access to the Draconic Hertiage feat itself, which you can get with the Dragontouched feat.  (Alternately, if you play a race that makes you dragonblooded, and you take levels of sorcerer, you can swap having a familiar for getting Draconic Heritage.)  Once you unlock the heritage feats, a whole list of neat abilities opens up.  Most of them flat-out give you a bonus ability for casting a spell, ranging from swift-action claw attacks, to short-range flight, to a lesser version of frightful presence.  Others let you sack spell slots for immediate-action save bonuses or standard-action breath weapons.  And some give you flat bonuses active all the time, such as better perceptions, or even more spells known (which is one of the few ways a duskblade can add spells to their list).  Since the former two types of feats scale up with the spell levels you have access to, they are overall considered "better" for a duskblade.  Draconic Breath in particular gives a duskblade interesting options when mixed up with feats like Entangling Exhalation or Exhaled Barrier.

Keep in mind, whatever choices you make, duskblades only get limited amounts of feats for their career.  Map out your choices and combos in advance, and try to be ready to cover situations where one attack style won't work, so you fall back on another.  For example, if a duskblade gets ''chill touch'', ''ghoul touch'', and ''enervation'', undead are going to be a problem; if they have Arcane Strike and/or Draconic Breath, they can simply choose to sack spell slots to do something more effective.

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